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Calling all creatives - glom this and let me know what you think in terms of implications...

Sorry. Can't get past the idea that the 'bayta' has 'literally' blown his mind.

I know, the style is a bit TikTok, but the content is worth it.

Turns out #3 son knows all about this but never told me...

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Tue Jun 13, 2023 12:55 pm Calling all creatives - glom this and let me know what you think in terms of implications...

Makes it a whole lot easier to be creative.

Only for a given value of creative.

I'm an artist trapped in the body of a baby navvy, having the manual dexterity of a disembodied foot. I thought, for a second, that AI image generation would be the thing that would get the ideas out of my head and onto "paper", bypassing that whole *shit fingers* element, and by God it just doesn't fucking work. Unless you're prepared to spend hours feeding it, fucking about with the prompts, tweaking this and that and then retouching the bastard thing at the end anyway, the results just plain don't impress. I wanted a simple "X in the style of Y" thing (a Cacodemon from Doom rendered in the shiny, cutesy, plastic-y CGI of babies' TV show Cocomelon) and after hours of fruitless pissing about, I think I'll just learn to draw.

I'm an artist trapped in the body of a baby navvy, having the manual dexterity of a disembodied foot. I thought, for a second, that AI image generation would be the thing that would get the ideas out of my head and onto "paper", bypassing that whole *shit fingers* element, and by God it just doesn't fucking work.

‘If it’s not hard to do it’s not as worthy’ has echoes in most creative sectors. I doubt Kraftwerk have Jimi Hendrix’s experience, dexterity and virtuosity with a musical instrument but so what? Using technology to by-pass the faff in producing your art is very creative in itself.

What doesn't change is the precious value of the original source. Without that, you're beached.

Youngian wrote: ↑Sat Jun 17, 2023 10:06 am Using technology to by-pass the faff in producing your art is very creative in itself.

'Producing' art is not a faff...

A film director already enjoys an analogue version of this AI concept. You need zero technical knowledge to produce your vision on screen, just tell your trusted crew what you want and they press the buttons for you.

If it's an analogue version then it's not AI, is it?

There's a rather good episode of Rich Herring's podcast where he's interviewing Reece Shearsmith of Inside No. 9 fame, who points out that having ideas and inspiration is all very well, but it's not a "good" idea until you actually work it through and find out whether or not it produces something viable.

There's a great bit about people pestering him (unintentionally) with the repeated notion "You should do one set on a no. 9 bus*"

"Oh yeah? Yeah? Wow. Write it then, ya CUNT".

I don't think it's the case that True Art™ has to be difficult, but it probably should require the artist to say least think it through.



*This has been a bit of a fanbase meme, to the extent that they faked up a bus-set episode in the most recent series, with a poster and even footage of "guest star" Robin Askwith.

Last week at school the Year 10s were doing their speaking and listening task which basically involved them giving a short speech to the rest of the class of a subject of their choice. Whilst most students researched their subject and wrote a good speech a few students used AI bots to produces their speeches. The AI produced speeches did look very good and were a big improvement on students simply cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. The only problem was that some of the vocab used was well beyond the capabilities of many pupils.

One student did a speech about the TV series Breaking Bad and the generated speech included the word 'Methamphetamine' while the student would have no problem saying meth he panicked when he saw the full name of the drug. So on one hand being able to compile a speech really quickly can be a bit of a plus for weaker pupils if the reading age of the speech is beyond the capabilities of the student it becomes a bit counter productive.

One of the powerful arguments against Wiki cut and paste was that it did precisely nothing to aid the learning process. I feel the same about AI, it is storing up trouble for the future when grown up people have to construct sensible reports or other documents from data which only they have.

Well, quite...

kreuzberger wrote: ↑Sat Aug 05, 2023 5:23 pm Well, quite...

How’s Japan getting on with its robot carers? Useful but not yet the silver bullet to combat the problem of demographic labour shortages. Hope robots get better at their job as living longer is a good thing while an exponential increase in human beings is a blight on the future existence of the planet.

Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care
The country wanted robots to help care for the elderly. What happened?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/0 ... obots/amp/

LAND OF THE RISING ROBOTS. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fan ... 0of%20work.

Interesting times over at OpenAI, where CEO, visionary and dreamweaver Sam Altman has been given his P45 and told to hand in his fob on the way to his car.

Needless to say, people don't just get suddenly fired from positions like that without something pretty fucking terrible behind it, so whether it's theft, fakery or something like the *horrific* tales about Altman floating around out there, it's certainly going to interesting finding out

I've gently dipped my toe in, and here's a quick review.

Surprisingly good:
Composing lyrics, poetry or short stories.
There is a recognisable style about the prose, which hints that you're dealing with AI.
That's less present in the songs and poems; probably because the structure of the form forces variations.

Terrifying:
Comprehension of language and composing pictures.

For comprehension, I took a manga series that #3 son reads, fed the AI character profiles for a fan wiki and asked it to predict events.
Most predictions were a hit in the sense that they've happened in the story, or events are lined up to make them happen.
What really amazed me was the lack of prompts for these events in the character profiles (There's a brief section describing friendships and rivalries of each character, but that's all).
I think this illustrated AI's much vaunted potential to spot minor patterns that people can't see - one where it excels at medical scan analysis.

Pictures, I know it's all about overlaying billions of sampled photos, but the results are remarkable.
A little too smooth and rounded to pass as fine art or photographs.
Facial expressions are currently bland, or direct samples.
You won't be getting Munch, Toyokuni or Da Vinci here.

Do expect deepfakes of Keir Starmer eating a bacon sandwich - very badly, or praying to Mecca while waving a Hamas flag.

A bit crap

Dialogue, with a human.

It's worth reviewing the background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_l ... processing.

Weizenbaum's Eliza, has been around for almost 60 years, was obviously a robot, but could conduct one end of a dialogue.

We now have chatbots embedded into online commercial apps including banking and shopping.
I get the feeling they do a good job at reducing the supplier's call volume.
I find they end up directing me to a Frequently asked question list (which I've already read) and can't work "outside that box".

I had a go at a system which conducted raw conversations.
Its ability to comprehend my words was remarkable.
The responses usually started extremely well, but tailed off into chains of predictable platitudes.
"It is through such things we grow and learn" - profound once, irritating in every second response.

The conversation engine really fell apart when pushed above a 1:1 dialogue.
A second computer character remained mostly quiet or echoed the words of the first.
(Which reminded me of an elderly pair of twin spinsters who lived next door to my grandparents when I was young, one was the talker, the other the echo).
With two human characters, the AI struggles to follow the sense of the conversation.

The other weakness appeared to be remembering facts form the conversation.
The AI was extremely good at inferring and remembering emotions (likes and dislikes), it had an immense background knowledge (wasn't wrong-footed when I suggested shopping for a Durian), but it completely forgot that we have driven to the shops by car.


So there's a lot of really powerful stuff there, with potential for good and evil.
Also a few areas of weakness, which a knowledgeable "blade runner" might exploit to distinguish man form machine.

Several times when I've asked Bing AI (Microsoft's AI-powered search) for help with niche technical problems, it's basically told me that it doesn't know the answer, but here's some help with a subtly different, (and therefore, to me) irrelevant problem.

This is, I suppose, to be expected. Currently AI is aggregating a ton of received wisdom, so struggles to be innovative. But it will come, undoubtedly.